Blog

House Judiciary Hearing on Immigration: Are These Wingnuts Still Running the Show?

by Van Le on 02/04/2013 at 5:02pm

As the House Judiciary Committee holds a full immigration hearing tomorrow, we wanted to highlight a few of the most anti-immigrant hardliners on the Committee and shine a light on their most notorious misdeeds. At a time when Republicans realize that they must do better with Latino voters and the issue of immigration, are nativists like the ones below still the people being allowed to run the show? Here’s a rundown of what the most zealous anti-immigrant extremists on the Judiciary Committee are known for:

Rep. Steve King (R-IA)

King is one of the most strident anti-immigrant voices in Congress: he has compared immigrants to dogs and then said it was a “compliment,” compared immigrants to cattle that we should keep out with an electrified fence, said he would sue President Obama to stop his DREAMer deferred action program, called immigration a “slow motion Holocaust,” claimed that immigrants could be spotted by their shoes, and said that Latinos vote Democrat because Democrats will give them “a great big check.” King even went so far as to build a model of a border fence on the House floor back in 2007. NOT sure “went do far” is best phrase — this isn’t his most offensive act.

Last year was a bad year for Lamar Smith, the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. His STEM Jobs Act, which is designed to kill the diversity visa, was introduced twice but went nowhere in the House; his SOPA bill was crushed after vehement opposition from Google, Wikipiedia, Facebook, etc., introduced a whole new universe of people to Lamar Smith; and his party lost the November election, taking a drubbing from Latino voters in part due to Smith’s anti-immigrant maneuvering of the Judiciary Committee. The last legislative session also saw the farewell of Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA), former chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee and Smith and King’s colleague-in-crime against immigrants and immigration reform.

Back in 2005, Rep. Sensenbrenner sponsored an anti-immigrant bill so extreme that his name today remains synonymous with ultra-right-wing nativism. Officially known as HB 4437, it was designed to block passage bipartisan immigration bills under consideration in the Senate and “re-elect” Republicans to the House in 2006 (though that didn’t out so well) LINK to my oped on Bilbray et al from Jan and would have erected a 700-mile long border fence, made E-Verify mandatory, turned immigrants and anyone who assisted them into felons, and dramatically reduced immigrant access to essential services. It was the threat of the Sensenbrenner bill that brought more than 1 million immigrants and their allies across the US onto the streets in the spring of 2006, marching and demonstrating on the need for immigration reform.

Last week, in response to the latest immigration reform developments, Sensenbrenner put out a statement saying that “extending amnesty to those who came here illegally or overstayed their visas is dangerous waters. We are a nation of laws, and I will evaluate any proposal through that matrix.”

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX)

Even for this list, Rep. Louie Gohmert is out there. His particular trademark is aligning overblown fears of undocumented immigration with overblown fears of terrorism, resulting most notably in his personal contribution to the English language, “terror babies.” Alleging that pregnant women from the Middle East made it a habit to come to the US to have their babies (his evidence was that he’d heard a lady on a plane speaking about it) Gohmert once said, “We’re bringing them over here on tourist visas, some illegally, letting them be born here and saying this is an American citizen. So come back in 20, 25 years when you’re ready to blow us up.”

In short, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee are not exactly paragons of wisdom and serenity. But for the Republicans’ sake, we hope these Republicans are not the ones running the show.

03/31/15
An important new story from Dara Lind at Vox captures the disconnect between written directives from DHS and the implementation of said directives by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Looking at the case of Pastor Max Villatoro and its implications, Lind explores […]
Read More »

03/31/15
AP: U.S. Appeals Judge’s Hold On President Obama’s Immigration Executive Action NBC News: U.S. Files Appeal of Texas Judge’s Hold on Immigration Action Vox: The government can’t enforce every law. Who gets to decide which […]
Read More »

03/30/15
Can simply being Latino be enough to help Ted Cruz win over Latino voters in 2016? According to La Opinion – the most-read Spanish-language daily in the nation — probably not: Cruz’s chances to win […]
Read More »

03/30/15
Gov. Scott Walker’s latest attempt to clarify his muddled and contradictory immigration stance actually hurts, not helps, him – on both policy and political grounds. In case you’ve missed Walker’s dizzying reversals on immigration: after […]
Read More »

03/27/15
From Mediaite comes a report that an immigration action town hall hosted by Rep. Luis Gutierrez earlier this week was interrupted by anti-immigrant activists infamous for also having protested the transfer of child refugees in […]
Read More »

03/27/15
Dozens of DREAMers from immigrant rights groups, State University of New York, and the City University of New York are now in day three of their hunger strike in support of the NY DREAM Act. […]
Read More »

03/26/15
Yesterday afternoon, over 50 New York DREAMers and their allies pledged a hunger strike after Governor Andrew Cuomo said he would be dropping the NY DREAM Act from the annual budget. Gov. Cuomo — who […]
Read More »

03/26/15
In California, 3:1 Support for Path to Citizenship, Including 61% of GOP Respondents California’s passage of the notoriously anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994 ushered in a trend of policies aimed at cracking down at immigrants. At the […]
Read More »

03/25/15
New Jersey Governor and potential 2016 Republican contender Chris Christie has taken the next step in embracing anti-immigrant politics by signing onto a brief seeking to block immigration executive action programs. As Elise Foley of […]
Read More »

03/25/15
When the Republican-led NY State Senate failed to pass the DREAM Act by a razor-thin margin last year, Governor Andrew Cuomo made the legislation a pivotal part of his re-election campaign and promised to include […]
Read More »